Winter Theater Festivals in New York City 2015

Winter theater festivals in New York: COIL, Under the Radar, American Realness, Frigid Festival

January is the month for theater festivals in New York —more than at any time other than the summer –

The reason these festivals have blossomed over the past decade is the presence of the thousands of attendees from throughout the nation at the annual convention of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.

If many of the productions are more reliably classified as performance art, the ticket prices are also much cheaper than most traditional theater.

Below are selections from seven festivals, all but one of them exclusively in January.

On a hallucinatory road trip from the Badlands to Graceland, the spirits of Elvis Presley and Theodore Roosevelt battle over the soul of Ann, a painfully shy meat-processing plant worker, and what kind of man or woman Ann should become.

Now celebrating its 11th anniversary, the Under the Radar Festival this year offers 20 works from seven countries (Argentina, Brazil, Iran, Spain, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.) Almost half of these fall under a new festival within the festival. In partnership with LaMaMa ETC, Under the Radar is launching the Incoming Series, work-in-process presentations from the Devised Theater Working Group.

An ambitious project by the protean performance artist and playwright etc. Taylor Mac. “Eventually, this work will become a 24-hour spectacle covering the last 240 years of popular music in America.” It’s currently in two parts, with separate admission.

On a stage filled with moving boxes, stories from three generations of the same family unfold simultaneously. Created by Brazil’s Companhia Hiato, founded by director and playwright Leonardo Moreira, the show is in Portuguese with English subtitles.

A glimpse at life in Iran told by Iranian theater artist Amir Reza Koohestani creates a fictionalized reunion of the actors from his international hit of decade ago, Dance on Glasses. Performed in Farsi with English supertitles.

One of the eight shows in the new “Incoming” series, this evening of “poetry and politics” is created by DarkMatter, a trans south asian art and activist collaboration comprised of Janani Balasubramanian and Alok Vaid-Menon.

The second year of this festival features, among other works, “Gray Spaces,” an evening of (unnamed) new works described as “existing between the black box of experimental theatre and the white rooms of the art museum” and “Asking for It” by Adriane Truscott, “one-half of the infamous Wau Wau Sisters, dressed only from the waist up and the ankles down, undresses and dresses down the rules and rhetoric about rape, comedy and the awkward laughs in between.”

Set in rural North Carolina a century ago, the show’s singers, puppetry, and multimedia stagecraft tell the story of a disabled boy whose older brother pushes him to be “normal.” It is written by composer Stefan Weisman and librettist David Cote, who is Time Out New York theater critic.

An art collective called My Barbarian responds to Brecht’s 1932 play The Mother with masks made of old Soviet newspapers, musical numbers, improvised content, audience participation, and interruptions with scenes from their repertoire, “including Counterpiblicity (2014), a performance based on MTV’s The Real World: San Francisco (1994)”

The Kraine Theater (85 East 4th Street between 2nd Avenue and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1st Avenue and Avenue A)

Dandy Darkly’s Pussy Panic, at Frigid 2015

February 18 – March 8

Twitter: @FrigidNewYork

“2 Theaters, 3 Weeks, 19 Days, 30 independent theater companies and over 150 performances.” Titles for the ninth annual Fringe Festival include Dandy Darkly’s Pussy Panic!, Hey ‘90s Kids, You’re Old, and I Was a Sixth Grade Bigfoot. (Yes, the origins of this festival are Fringe.) In addition, “the artists are chosen by lottery, and 100% of ticket sales are returned to artists.”